Kyoto

This is ripped off of an email, but hey it's what I've been up to for the last week. Hugs all.

The aquarium was set up by fantastic Japanese design principles. So you took an escalator all the way to the top, and then you walked a slow spiral down. You know the Guggenheim?  It's the famous modern art museum in NYC that's built by the same design principle which makes for a very easy and pleasant visit. You can't get lost, because you only go one direction, and it's a gentle downhill slope the whole time.

What's especially cool about this is that the tanks can then be incredibly deep, like three stories deep, which means the animals have their little enclosure and can dive with a lot more room than it appears. It's also cool because of course the ocean is a vertical ecosystem as much as a horizontal one, and you get to experience it that way.

So at the top they have otters, I love otters so much, because they're always doing something. These ones were gnawing their adorable little paws in a cuddle puddle together. Then down to the ring tailed something from Japan I'd never seen, and this awesome Asian wombat kind of creature who looked like he was made for a Disney movie. I'm talking big eyes fluffy body.

Ok on to the fish which is what you care about. They had a coral reef tank but it wasn't the focus. I mean reef fish are pretty, but 1. I have been snorkelling in way better real reefs than are in this tank and 2. They just didn't bring out the big guns, you know the top level rainbow Hawaii fish or whatever.

Dolphins! They had a variety I had never seen which had black and white stripes. Like markings, a white underbelly and then the top of them mostly black but with some white striping as well. And they were so active, both cresting their fins over the water surface all the time and diving down, sometimes two together like a pair. And here's the thing, because of the structure of the aquarium you encountered this same tank like two or three times, so the same dolphins you saw diving from the top you would then see them underwater further down.

They had king penguins and like three other kinds, and at one point one penguin made a pile of snow and stood on top of it and another penguin bit him on the tail. The king penguins formed an orderly line to jump in the water.

The biggest tank had whale sharks and hammerheads. Woah hammerheads look small when compared to whale sharks. And like at least four varieties of rays and some schooling fish. The muscularity of the whale shark tails were like the best part of the whole thing.  They just did this slow loop and they were huge, but that was the middle tank so you did a slow downward spiral across the whole tank. See what I did there?

And there were some fish I'd never seen, things that looked like bass, but huge and prehistoric and a fish with legs also like the size of a dog and fish that looked like half a fish.

And the jellyfish section was very special, some incredible colors, like blooming roses some of these.

Ok while I'm here I might as well talk about the 10,000 tori temple. It was a temple to the goddess Inari. Inari you will remember is not only the delicious sweet tofu pocket which is a food, but also the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Her symbol is the fox. Foxes apparently love inari the food as a special treat. The fox is a trickster god because wealth and prosperity is tricksy.

But the temple is structured with you know those square gates in front of the temple, tori gates. So you can go on a path that's 10, 000 of them in a row, just a really long archway up a hill of these gates and along the way there's a million little shrines and bells and fox statues. Very pretty. And I had inari fox soup at one of the little cafes. And a bunch of girls dress up in traditional kimono and go up the temple, presumably for a reason.

Jes and I hung out at a cat cafe where each of the cats had like a dating profile you could read. It was pretty cute.

We made friends with everyone at the Nepalese restaurant and bar down the street, and that's actually how we wound up going to the aquarium because they recommended it.

And of course Japan is a pokemon go wonderland. We're busily levelling.

Beijing

It was the best night train ever on the way into Beijing. 
1) They have to jack the train and put it on new wheels at the border.
2) We had been meeting people on tours and hostels so already had our train friends lined up, then the next door couple came and recruited us.
3) I'm being actively interested in my messenger conversations lately.
4) World's coolest couple started an absinthe party in the dining car.  He's a documentary filmmaker who specializes in trains.  She runs an absinthe museum.  Party started. 

So it was this orgy of stimulation with cool stuff happening on all sides of me. 

We rolled into Beijing in the morning into cutest little guesthouse ever featuring super sweet 5 star concierge man. 

In Beijing I was most interested in the art, which was pretty disappointing.  I mean pretty amateur stuff which surprised me because I thought the traveling exhibitions featuring contemporary Chinese work were really great. 

That was one of our days but we discovered some awesome little areas.  First there's like every little street.

There are so many streets you couldn't take a car down.  The answer?  Everyone has a little modded out scooter with like a tiny car body built around it to varying levels of professionalism.  Jes thought they were all art cars waiting to happen and some of them seriously an led light string away from seeing them at a festival. 

We hung out in Tienanmen twice on one day, seeing the flag lowering ceremony.  It was weird to see it as a place unhinged from all I know of it. 

We also did the summer palace, the temple of heaven and the forbidden city, as well as jinshein park.  The park and the summer palace both have high manmade hills to climb up with views of the city. 

All the buildings are very splendid old Beijing, lots of fitted wood no nail construction with beautifully refreshed paint jobs.  Similar kind of Buddhist construction to a lot of southeast Asian temples, but different decorative elements. 

There's a million locals at a lot of these sights which is cool.  Summer palace had marble boats and ferries to an island in the water and big lovely palaces in the middle and the hill to climb and you could look out over the skiffs on the water. 

Our favorite restaurant district was also around a pond thing which had waist high water lilies in it and people would swim (gross!) and boat and people really fly kites.  Little kites and grown people. 

It was really lovely and there was a lot of nonstop wandering around and looking at stuff. 

Haiku Written on the Great Wall at Dawn

The limitless haze unfolds
Mountains behind mountains fade in purple beyond.
Behind the sun hides

Feet in the dust which crumbles
Bones of an ancient wall dying ever slowly
My back against stone

My guide says the winds don't stop
And at the crest of the mountain ridge, on my face.
The wind never stops

Walk along the cool morning
March with the crenellated sentinels to see
The desolate sun

Ulaan Bataar

Asian influence has hit in Mongolia so the food has some rad asian elements. It definitely reads more asian than russian for example, in how people look, in the Buddhist (with Hindu influence I think) temples, in architecture (it spent some time as a Chinese protectorate).

In Ulaan Bataar we decided that Mongolia is ground zero of the zombie apocolypse. We are staying in an apartment that is above a medical clinic. Good spot to take out the first floor stairs and have a supply of meds and a clinic/ prep and storage facility. The doors were incredible. The one in our apartment had a metal door, triple bolted with entirely mechanical locks, with get this a little flap that opened to a guard that had a hole just large enough to shoot a bolt action crossbow out of if there was a zombie at your door.

There are just a lot of abandoned playgrounds with one sad metal slide in them and that sort of thing, that make you feel like you did just wake up in 28 days later.

But the people of Ulaan Baatar is like a whole nation of people on a first date. Everywhere you go there are couples of dressed up adorable kids holding hands, sharing a soda etc. It's a real weird contrast to the post apocalyptic feel of the surrounds. But I think these guys will band together into plucky bands of survivors pretty quickly.

We hadn't seen any movies since we left the US because language barriers so we went nuts at the IMAX. I got to see Star Trek, Independence Day 2, Nerve (this was all the same week so we were scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point) and Suicide Squad (the next week when we got back from our tour).

Structure was 3 days UB, then 5 days ger camp, 1 day in cottage by tour operator, 7 day tour, 2 days UB.

We ran all our touring through Minjin, a woman we found on couchsurfers.com. After our 3 apartment nights we stayed in her guesthouse, her family cottage and she took us out to find the ger camp and organised the tour so it worked out well with transfers and stuff.

It was also a big help because I was freaking pretty bad on money, feeling out again only a month after Jeremy had bailed me out. Jes and I did a lot of math and discovered she had some money built up since May. We also wound up working with Minjin because she had prices about 2/3 what the other operators we looked at had. So we wound up figuring we could make it through these two weeks on the money we actually had and then work through my salary, probably surviving the month. By then we'll be in Japan, that's a problem for future Maile.

The national museum had a small collection, couple of hours max but it was very quality for what mongolia has. Ancient deer stones, traditional mongolian clothes (so elaborate and cool, I think they ripped Queen Amadala's wardrobe off of this stuff) Gers and their furnishings, and some stuff from Genghis Khan (Actually Chiinghis haan) era, including some cool clothes, armour, weapons and horse tack from centuries ago. So some really cool artifacts, limited in scope and period, but really good for the significant parts of mongolia.  

Transiberian sex toys and why not?

Well at least it's something different from what they've got in every other airport.

I said goodbye to Russia, toasting the birch trees with straight vodka in my hand and straight beauty in my heart. 

The landscape changed as we crossed the border, heartbreaking to be saying goodbye and inspiring to be seeing the craggy rocks and grasslands yurts (Gers here) dotting the fields.  Real mountains appearing.

On the border there was some passport confusion.  I entered Russia on my Australian passport and needed to enter Mongolia on my US one.  Mongolia has no visa requirements for USAians.  But apparently has recently instituted them for other places due to poor performance for them at the ASIAN conference.

So anywho I had a brief discussion in point with the border official
Hmm your passport doesn't have an exit stamp from Russia
Oh that's okay it's in this passport
Oh ok I'll just stamp this passport then
No you want to stamp this passport
I don't think I do
No really

So I get across the visa thing and she goes away, and comes back some time later.  I am at this point in bed.  Which means I have no bra or shoes on.  She asks me to come with her and I do, thinking we're going to another car.

So we exit the train.  She points at my feet.  I shrug.  I was in bed yo but it's no good going back now.  So we go to some office about 6 train cars up from mine in the train station and she talks the guy through my predicament and he basically says he doesn't want the paperwork and he'll stamp my US. 

None of these convos are had in English mind.  So she sends me back out.  The train is starting to make those exhaust releasing about to go noises. I fast walk towards my car contemplating that while I don't have any money or you know underwear I am clutching a passport so that will come in handy if I'm left at the border.  I try to get in the car before mine.  It's locked.  I try to get in my car.  The stairs aren't down but there's a soldier there who pulls me up onto the train.  It goes within 5 minutes.  Jes is poking her head out looking for me.

We coast into the Mongolian night and in the morning the landscape has all changed.  We are somewhere else.

My "flight" to Vilnius

One of the things about off the beaten track Europe is that it's a little harder getting in and out of there, like there's not just a eurail going everywhere.

So I spent some time working on how we'd get into Vilnius and came up with a really cheap flight. 

The flight routed through Warsaw and Riga which is how we stopped back over in Warsaw.

Quick stop to talk about Warsaw too-- we really went through the old town this time, which has a more torun feel the cobblestone streets and flower basket restaurants. 

It made me excited like maybe there's other little Toruns around the place oozing romance and love. 

Ok so our flight to Riga is delayed and we miss our connection.  So because the Balkans are tiny they decide get this that it's faster and maybe cheaper to give us a taxi to Vilnius. 

So we wind up on this three hour taxi ride from town to town with two other people one of whom is this very intense but also very cool human rights activist vegan chick who does a lot of work with sex workers rights.  So interesting BC I come at it from a very sex slave perspective and her very much from a sex workers union red alliance perspective. 

We get to Vilnius at long last and it's just magic.  There's a Thai massage place attached to our apartment building.  To get to our apartment you have to go through this tunnel with graffiti to this local square with smoking waiters and
into a secret door with another courtyard and then you go down a couple stairs into our beautiful little hobbit hole.

Vilnius itself is also magic; it's only one block of stuff basically but we wandered around and
basically moved in seeing a bunch of minor church and pretty architecture sights.  Also here Hearts of Iron 4 came out so we played computer games and got massages as well. 

Ok party on.  Having an amazing time in Mongolia. 

Mother Russia I

We travel, Helsinki to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian, Helsinki to Moscow with my mom and Harmony.

The schedule runs

Helsinki 6 days

St Petersburg 7 days

Tula 3 days

Moscow 5 days

Yeketarinburg 2 days

Omsk 3 days

Irkutsk 6 days

Ulan-Bator 18 days in Mongolia

Beijing 4 days then a tour down China

At time of writing I am on the Trans-Siberian between Omsk and Irkutsk, where I landed today.

Tula

So Tula was a stand in for Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate. Though we did have some fun times at the official samovar museum and the local cathedral and the statue of Lenin, etc. Partying all around the city in a spare half day/ arrival day. Our apartment was a little scruffy, a real local haunt, and the whole town was like really not touristy. There was no way to hail cabs so we made friends with our first cab driver who became kind of our private driver. Very little common language but he was super sweet.

Ok Yasnaya Polyana.

We spent two full days there, the first walking the estate, the second we got a tour of the house.

So we arrived, and I know a lot about Tolstoy and his whole life takes place in and around here. And he writes it into things, writes about it, his biographers talk about it, and it is just so beautiful, so recognisable. You walk in the gates and the first thing you see is the birch prospekt. This is not the same trees that Tolstoy saw, birches only live about 70 years so they lovingly replant them in stages, some young, some growing old. They march up the wide and graceful avenue in a double line.

My dream was to walk every path in Tolstoy's estate and we did, wandering all over it. We went to the little carriage house all set up with traditional things.

We went to his grave, covered only with the lush green grass, overlooking the creek where he and his brother played. On the spot where his brother (died young) wrote the secret to life happiness and peace, the end to all striving of mankind, on a green stick and then buried it. Tolstoy always hoped to find it.

You walk a way in the woods to his grave. A woods that would have always been there.

We walked to the fields and as far as we walked there were people still before us, having picnics, gathering wildflowers, and family and a dog, the golden grasses. We walked to where the peasants would have laboured.

We wandered over the estate proper, with its fruit trees, the fruit trees the poor would cut down some times for firewood. It was Sonia's job to punish them, and what did punishing them mean when Tolstoy got his new understanding of life?

Just on the entrance is the large pond, the pond to which Sonia would have run in desperation threatening suicide, when Tolstoy began to say he must abandon the family.

And to the right was the wilder English garden, natural with a series of cascading ponds, small ones. With a bridge built of birch sticks we could walk over. This is how we exited both days. It was Tolstoy's mother's favorite part, where she would walk every day.

Above the English gardens near the house were the French gardens, where the formal flower beds were, where Tolstoy's father preferred to walk, still immaculately maintained and here are where the mock orange and lilac were.

There was a crooked old pine you could see from the study window, which must have been there. But his most long lasting study looked out on the lilac bushes, I didn't expect that.

We found the well, a spring and I washed my face, it was on the other side of a silent pine wood, where you could walk and hear the stillness, past where most people were, with a floor of moss and birch bark and pine needles. Mushrooms sprouted.

The house we got an incredibly sweet English speaking tour guide. She told us so many stories and answered our numerous questions with grace. We were slow enough she let other tour groups go past. We toured the school which had limited artifacts and was a bit story of his lifeish, and the house which had incredible artifacts.

Busts and statues and sketches his friends had done of him. His daughter's artwork. Portraits of his family back three generations. The original portraits done of him, the famous ones that are on the cover of his books. It was incredible. The drawing room set up with the furniture, so you could see how they set up the salons. The piano where people would play Chopin, Beethoven which would make him weep. Even when he decided music was sensuous and he wanted it no more. The gymnastic equipment set up outside where he did gymnastics every day until he was like 70.

Sonia's writing desk next to the door, between the public drawing room and the family one. It was so tiny, so modest, where such great work was done, where she copied out Anna Karenina 7 times. Her tiny desk where she laboured at the estate accounts, every day, for 50 years, itemising carefully, probably where she itemised everything after his death. Just a little inkwell, room for two pages.

And his books in every room his books, not like Nabokov's scattered to the wind, the whole collection lovingly preserved. The revolution came to this house, but the peasants did not want to destroy the great man and they set up a guard around it. The Nazi's came, I don't know what stayed their hands, but the Soviets made it a national museum, and his daughter worked with them, her sacrifice, she turned it over to the state, gave up her claim, and they preserved it in the public trust, destroyed nothing after all.

This grand estate and so it still is as it was, the work of so many people, and so much universal respect. You could read the titles of many of his books because he read in so many languages. In the guest room there was a section of books about him presented by friends, diplomats, the endless string of important and interesting people who passed through this house, modest for a lord with 8 children.

And his study. He had three studies, they showed you all of them and set one up, the last one near his bed, an old man's bed. His watch he wound every day was next to it, his comb his razor. The peasant blouses he wore around, called Tolstoys by the end.

And his desk, his large heavy wooden desk, with the low stool, made for one of his children but with a large cushion for him. And the couch, THE couch, the black leather couch he was born on, that all his children were born on. The black leather couch that was always in his study, that he kept always by him, that he would sleep on when he worked too long. It looked just like itself, its leather only slightly frayed. It was there his desk was there everything was right there, and I trembled and near wept.

His study he stayed in the longest with a view of the lilacs had a vaulted plaster roof like a root cellar or a monk's chamber, but good light, he liked it because the walls were so thick and he needed silence to work.

And of course for scholars they have so many manuscripts too. With his insane annotations and reedits scrawled all over. In his bedroom he kept portraits of some of his children, and of Sonia when he married her, and in her middle life.

It was so beautiful, so so beautiful and so like it was, with the birch and pine and fruit trees and flowers and avenues and paths. It was like the bright space in his heart, a home.

Trees

Birches rise like slender young girls their white trunks delicately covered by coruscating leaves, like eucalypts. The pine is darker, fir trees with tiny cones, dark dark evergreens. Neither gets big, so they are all slender, all multitudinous trunks with freefalling branches. Both of them have the kind of drooping branches, 'dying with a dying fall,' like willows. The trees are ghosts too, I had heard them written so many times and when I saw them, I recognised them. There's a prospect of white birches marching up to Tolstoy's house from the pond, past the English garden, in which his mother would wander.

On the train, stands of trees intersperse with farmlands and concrete block apartments and wooden shacks. It is not as untouched as I thought it would be. There are many little towns and homesteads and the stands of trees are small and scattered between the fields strewn with wildflowers and the hills strewn with birch and pine.

#Trainlife

So the Trans-siberian is going on the long list of adventures I've had where people worry how you're going to die, tie your door handles shut at night, watch out for the gangs and stabbings, you must speak Russian, blahblahblah, also it takes forever, friendships end, blahblah, that are just not true. Ok we sprung for first class, but our cabin is lovely two little couchettes and there's comfy pillows and included slippers, and second class is just two more people on the top bunk which is more crowded but still, and the dining cars are pretty with a full menu, some of which I can eat, there are waitstaff, a selection of 5 beers, people are charging their electronics in the hallway, we've made two sets of train friends on three trains. Where is the ruggedness, the intensity, the danger? Only in war zones I fear, cause those are getting to be the only places I haven't gone.

I feel like if I'd gotten on this train with literally nothing to do I would still not be truly bored of looking at the trees through the window by the end.

Ok so the cabins are lovely and we've shut down the restaurant car with new train friends twice, the second time staying out til like 2 in the morning. That's all been fun, and also feels.

I love being on the train, feeling the movement, and the first night it rocked me to sleep in the night, the most rested I'd been for ages, after a long kerfuffle of getting on the train where we missed our first one and had to pay a bunch of fees and get on six hours later and argue in a lot of russian and run with our bags down the platform with tears in our eyes as the train pulled away, but then it did pull away. And we were free, and I have felt the soft movement and scrolling scrub forests as a part of my trip more than a transition, a real part of life I'm not tired of when I leave it.

I read Tolstoy all at once, but I've been trickling Dostoevsky through my life, I read the Idiot in Vietnam, at the leprosy colony. I read house of the dead here, or am reading.

Yeketarinburg

Yekatarinburg is on the line between Europe and Asia, and we went to that line. To get here we have crossed the continent line.

It also has the church where the Romanovs were killed in the revolution. It was a house at the time but they built the church on the spot and canonized the Romanovs in modern times. It was pretty spec, extra gold as you do, and some monks were on a tour and started a hymn while we were there. Also it was called the church of the spilled blood like the last one we saw in petersburg where Alexander II was killed.

And we did a bit of going to bed early and getting up late, only there a couple of days, there was probably a little more of this town than we saw though we did like every sight.

An unusual thing is it was a college town so a bunch of super friendly semi locals proliferated.

Omsk

Omsk was where Dostoevsky was imprisoned. The Petrovists were a group that advocated rights to the serfs and some of them (including D, and maybe) the violent overthrow of the government but you know the French revolutions so Nicholas I was pretty sketch, and then he read aloud a letter Belinsky's letter to Gogol and he got sent to Siberia. The whole group was taken to Peter and Paul fortress (St Petersburg but I didn't make it there next time hey) where three of them were mock executed. Dostoevsky was next in line. The ghost of this follows him through every story.

So he went for 6 years to Siberia, some time commuted to get it down to that. And lived in a prison colony … he didn't get back for 9 years, and he published House of the Dead in the 10^th.

But nothing is there anymore. Not the prison colony or where he was held, we saw the museum but it wasn't much, but the town was lovely, about to celebrate its 300^th anniversary and redoing parks and avenues. We spent some time profitably wandering and seeing the cathedral and the streets and playing pokemon and doing laundry and talking. But in three days we probably had more time than we needed for the town.

Literature

Petersburg is full of ghosts. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, even Tolstoy write this city. So there are two things, one is that they write, and then you see, and you recognise it. And the second way, that the streets you wander are the same streets, the same names, the same buildings they walked down. You see the world through their eyes.

My mom and I slipped out one day while everyone else was still asleep and made it to Haymarket square where Raskolnikov knelt down and begged for forgiveness, and walked from there to Dostoevsky's house. Now when I say Dostoevsky's house, he lived in 10 different places in Petersburg and moved around a ton. Three of them were on the same road though, and he wrote the Gambler and Crime and Punishment and so much. And Crime and Punishment was the key one, the one I understood anew from being here. Because Raskolnikovs house is around the corner from his, a corner he walked looking up at the garrets and decided which one he would live in, which basement the landlady, which first floor his friend. The plaster was broken on the top corner where he was. And catty corner to D's house is Sonia's house, like I think you could see her window from his. As he wrote as he did. And then you can walk past Sonia's house to where he would commit the murder, along Gribdoyev canal and we stayed off the same canal, across the bridge where he agonised and thought of throwing the packet over but then he didn't he hid it under a stone and further to where he killed the moneylender, and there's a courtyard, fenced, where the construction would have been set up that covered his crime, where the workmen would have been milling. And I imagined all of his wanderings to be much further, but no they are all there in the few blocks he would have wound himself around and around. In his neighborhood where he lived. To see it all, so small so ungrand, changes my reading of the book I think, but I will have to read it again to know, it's been years.

The day my mom was sick, Jes and Harmony and I went to another major cathedral and Nabokov's house. Talk about your ghosts, you know for Nabokov his childhood and this childhood home loomed so large. And they had things like his chess problems and books they had reclaimed from his collection and his butterfly collection. Though you know he never could go back and the library was seized and sold and the ones that have been recollected it's years later, he talked about finding one of the books in a used bookshop in London. How did it get there? What are the chances of crossing paths with it again? How would it feel to find it and to find it on the terms that it is not yours? The house itself, so beautiful, wood inlay on the ceiling and walls, and so detailed, and again, I recognised it when I saw it, like seeing something you have seen in a dream.

And you know Nabokov, he drew an imaginary butterfly on all his books and dedicated it to his wife vera, and he would give each a genus and species and the imaginary butterflies fit into the real imagined genus and species.

And of course Yasnaya Polyana.